I work with many clients right now and most are being impacted by the economy in one way or another. Companies are looking for ways to “trim the fat” wherever they can. This certainly holds true for advertising dollars. What I am consistently seeing is people wanting to knee-jerk a decision based off of a couple of days of data. This will destroy your business. I love analytics as much as the next guy but day-by-day data assessment is not going to do anything for you. Before you make a decision to make a change in an SEO, PPC, EMAIL, MEDIA campaign, ask yourself the following questions first:

1. Are my goals being 100% tracked? Meaning, do some of your leads/sales come by way of phone? If they do, you need to either figure out a way to track phone calls or spread the conversions across all of your ad campaigns in proportion to the amount of traffic these campaigns produce.
2. Are you judging your winning and losing campaigns with data significance? If you are only getting 200 visits a day to your site, with an average conversion rate of 1%, you would need to run your campaign for 10 days to get enough data to really understand if it is working or not working. Prematurely judging or reacting to a campaign would be like deciding on whether or not you liked a movie in the first 10 minutes of it starting. Make sure to get a real picture look before making a decision.
3. Once you feel you hit data significance, react swiftly and decisively. Do not prolong the inevitable.
4. Are you exhausting the long tail? Especially for search, long tail keywords (3 word phrases +) will be a positive ROI for your campaign 99% of the time. The problem is, there is not a lot out there. Make sure that your are exhausting budget here first, and if there is any money left over, spend it on the broad keywords.
5. Don’t panic, there is still money out there, there are buyers. I still have to wait to get into my favorite restaurant or by a shirt at my favorite botique. Right now is the most amazing time in any of our generations to win market share from large companies unable to make a move. Best Buy is probably spending more money advertising right now to win all of the market share that Circuit city just left behind. Take advantage. There are always lots of positives in a bad economy!

Now this is very interesting. I had my suspicions that Google would use Search Wiki to “improve” organic results, now it seems as though they are going to use google employees to decide what is relevant and what is not. Although I believe this will get rid of some of the junk out there, it is going to be risky and they need to make sure they don’t turn into a Fox news or something, deciding what they want their viewers to read.  Here is more on this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/12/googlewashing_revisited/

A recent post on TechCrunch gives great information on how well Search engine marketing is doing compared to other advertising methods:

“According to eMarketer, search ad spending will reach $10.4 billion this year, more than twice as much as advertisers will spend on display ads. More importantly for Google, search ads will represent 42 percent of all advertising spending, while display ads will account for just 21 percent of all online advertising.” -TechCrunch

You can read the full story here